Fear of falling, p.6
Fear of Falling, page 6
The weather worsened as we reached North Yorkshire, the sweeping moorland, with its covering of dark purple heather, looking desolate and unwelcoming. We passed the enormous pyramid at RAF Fylingdales, a nuclear-missile early-warning station.
‘There used to be three giant golf balls there. We came here for days out when we were on holiday in Scarborough sometimes,’ I said.
‘To the air base?’
‘No, idiot, to the moors.’
A pub serving food sat at the junction a quarter of a mile from the caravan site, and we stopped there for pie and mash.
The caravan was three times the size of my parents’ tourer. The bedroom was separate from the living area and kitchen so we didn’t have to assemble a bed each night by moving the table and fitting together the couch cushions, as I’d been used to. From our pitch we could see over the grassy clifftop to the sea, slate grey under the sullen sky.
As we were going to sleep, I said to Mac, ‘We don’t have to stay if it rains all week, do we?’
‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’
I woke to the smell of frying bacon and when I pulled back the curtains the sun poured in. I felt a kick of excitement, a lightness I hadn’t felt since the pregnancy test.
We went into town, making for the main beach on the west of the harbour. Whitby is divided by the River Esk, and houses climb either side of the steep valley, all red pantiled roofs and white walls peppered with small windows. Two piers embrace the harbour, like pincers, each with a lighthouse at the end. There were warning signs along the pier walls about the dangers of the water in rough weather. Extensions had been built to the piers to add further protection for the port.
On the cliffs above the west beach stands a statue of Captain Cook, who left Whitby to travel to Australia and New Zealand, and close by, a whalebone arch, testament to the town’s importance as a major whaling port.
From the sands we could see the towering ruin of Whitby Abbey on the opposite headland.
The water off the east coast is frigid, even on a summer’s day. It’s the North Sea – apparently the coldest in the world – and I can testify to that: I screamed as the waves hit my back, and soon my fingertips were numb and white.
The next day we walked to see the Mallyan Spout, the waterfall in Goathland village, and back. We bought postcards and wrote them in a pub where we had crab sandwiches for lunch. I sent Bel one of the abbey: We have sunshine, sea, chips. Good to get away.
But there were babies everywhere, babies, children, men pushing prams, pregnant women. It was impossible to avoid them, thronging the narrow winding streets that led down to the harbour, filling the cafés, the penny-arcades and shops, clustered on the sands.
I tried to relax about it, allowed myself to watch two sisters sketch pictures in the sand with the canes of their fishing nets and to follow the progress of a baby, who kept crawling towards the shoreline. His father would scoop him up when he got close and take him back up the beach, tossing him into the air and catching him, the child shrieking with delight.
My composure broke when we walked back up the hill on the third day and met a family coming down. The parents carried folding chairs and a cool box. Older children had bags and towels. All of a sudden the mother flung down her chair and shouted, ‘Stop your bloody whining.’ She yanked a toddler out from the group and slapped his legs. ‘Shut it,’ she said. Slap. ‘I’m not telling you again.’ Slap.
The boy’s face worked hard as he fought to stop crying. The woman picked up her things and they all carried on. The child was still weeping, but silently, snot all over his face, lip quivering, dragging his big plastic spade along the ground.
I stopped. Tears blurring my vision.
‘Lydia?’
‘I’m all right,’ I said. But I wasn’t. Mac helped me back to the car where I sat and howled. Afterwards, I was drained and sad. But it helped to cry. A valve for the pressure.
Mac dropped me at the caravan and went off to fetch fish and chips.
Niall had created a small garden with a picnic table and a white picket fence at the back of the caravan. We sat out there to eat and watch the darkness fall.
We talked about Mac’s family, his mother, about his growing up on the farm. His nephews and nieces.
We made love that night. The bed squeaked but the caravan was stable enough not to rock, as far as I could tell. Afterwards, even though I knew it was in all likelihood futile, I lay on my back with my knees bent to maximise the chance of conceiving.
‘We can walk from here to the abbey,’ Mac said, the next morning. ‘The Cleveland Way goes along the cliffs.’
I hesitated at the idea. The cliffs were high and crumbling, the land being eaten away by the sea. Whole cottages had fallen in along the coast. But there’d be some fencing – and if Mac walked on the outside I needn’t look down, so I went along with it.
The path crossed from our caravan site through rough meadow. Bees and flies were busy among the wildflowers, buttercups and clover, vetch and blue gentian.
The path drew closer to the edge of the land. There were signs on the fencing: Keep Out – Dangerous Cliffs. My pulse speeded up and a humming noise filled the back of my skull.
It’s fine. You’re fine.
I tried to concentrate on the ground at my feet, the trodden earth of the path, the tough grass that could withstand the salt air.
But then the path narrowed. We had to walk single file. I let Mac go ahead and tried to follow. Sweat licked behind my knees, across my neck and my back. I could hear the crash and roar of the sea below to my right. There were just a few feet between the footpath and where the land fell away.
It was hard to get any air. My heart was pounding, like the waves smashing against the rock face.
The humming grew more intense. I felt a sizzling up the back of my neck and over my scalp. I thought I’d faint. Everything was loud and bright and warped.
I froze, bent over. ‘Mac. I can’t.’
He turned back. ‘What? Lydia?’
My hands were shaking. Dread crawled through me. I was too close. It was too high. ‘I can’t.’
‘OK. OK.’
He guided me back. I let him lead me, my hands around his waist.
As we walked further from the cliff edge my senses settled, my pulse slowed, the fear subsided.
‘I thought it was just high buildings,’ Mac said, when we were safely back at the caravan.
‘Anywhere high, really.’
‘You think you’ll fall?’
‘Or jump.’ I laughed. It sounded stupid. ‘Just lose control and throw myself off. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be soft,’ he said. ‘So – I’ll cancel the hang-gliding session, shall I?’
‘Shut up.’
On our last afternoon we browsed the antiques shops and the jewellers where they sold Whitby jet – made from fossilised monkey-puzzle trees, I told Mac, a fact I’d remembered from geography.
I bought a pair of drop earrings for Bel’s birthday present and a pendant for myself, an unusual design, a single stone carved like a bunch of grapes on a silver chain. Grapes are a symbol of fertility. Did I buy it as an amulet? Hoping it would confer some sort of magic? Bring us the baby we so wanted?
They retrieved eight eggs in the second round. Eight! Any restraint I’d been exercising, trying not to get too involved, too obsessed, evaporated. Surely with eight we could create one healthy embryo.
Sleep that night was impossible. I lay next to Mac, my eyes closed, and tried to quiet my mind, suppress my fears, systematically relaxing my muscles, but nothing helped. Lurking deep inside me was a bleak, bitter pessimism that had grown over the months of failure. In the end I let my terrors come. Set out my stall as if I was running an experiment, listing hypothetical outcomes. All the worsts that could happen.
(a) No fertilisation.
(b) No fertilisation and the revelation that my eggs would never be fit for purpose.
(c) A deterioration in Mac’s sperm quality; he was now infertile.
(d) The detection of uterine cancer requiring immediate hysterectomy.
I wove darker and darker scenarios until the alarm went off and I got up and took my medication.
The call came at eleven thirty. I was at work.
There was only one fertilised egg.
I rang Mac at the shop. ‘OK,’ he said, the disappointment clear in his voice. ‘At least we have one. Are you OK?’
‘Stupid question,’ I said.
‘Do you want to go home? I’ll come back soon as I can.’
‘No, I’ll stay. I’m on call tonight.’
I functioned like a robot, fetching platelets from the incubator, bags of blood cells from fridges, plasma from the freezer.
I didn’t feel hungry but I forced myself to eat a little.
I thought about that one tiny embryo, six cells becoming eight, carrying our genes.
After lunch that day there was a sudden flurry of activity in the lab, people gathering round the TV in the staff lounge. What was all the fuss? I watched planes ploughing into skyscrapers, the shaky footage of crowds fleeing, of screaming and sirens, heard the talk of co-ordinated attacks. I watched it feeling almost numb. Then I began to shake.
That night, sleeping at the hospital, I was bleeped twice: a stabbing victim first, then, just as I got back into bed, I was called again. Two men had been injured when a wall had collapsed on a construction site. With serious internal injuries they needed a lot of O neg running down to surgery until I could cross-match and work out their blood types.
While I worked I was haunted by the images of those planes, imagined how the hospitals there would be frenetic dealing with the casualties. The wholesale slaughter. And I also thought of the speck of life in the lab, dividing and growing, the promise of a baby.
The clinic called me again the following morning.
‘I’m so sorry, the embryo has stopped developing. It’s not viable.’
My stomach fell. I sat heavily. Ice in my veins. ‘Why?’
‘It may be there was some genetic abnormality. It’s not uncommon. We’ll arrange for you to see the consultant. Discuss it with her. I’m sorry.’
Nothing. We had nothing.
Mrs Simpson advised that if we went for another round, and fertilisation was successful, they would like to delay transfer until day five, giving the embryos more time to mature, to reach the blastocyst stage when cells start developing to form both the embryo and the placenta. It was likely that some embryos would fail between day two and day five but we would then be proceeding with the strongest ones. She told us there was no pressure to go ahead, to take a break if we wished.
‘We could wait till the spring,’ Mac said, as we drove home. ‘You could have a rest from it all. The injections, the stress.’
‘I’m not waiting a minute longer than I have to.’ I raised my voice.
Mac looked startled.
‘I want to do it as soon as we can, just get on with it.’ I was angry, heat under my skin, my heart racing. Angry that we’d failed. Angry with my body, with the science that had let us down. An irrational, fervent anger.
‘And if next time doesn’t work? Do we stop?’ Mac said.
I shook my head. I didn’t know. After that we’d have to pay for treatment, whether it was more IVF or using donor eggs. Would we become those people who sacrifice everything for just one more chance? Who sell their houses and take out loans, borrow from family and friends, travel abroad in search of the next groundbreaking treatment?
‘We’ve never talked about adoption,’ Mac said.
‘I can’t, not now.’ It won’t be ours, I thought. Not truly, not really. It won’t have our genes.
My masochistic imagination had continued to dwell on the twins, to fashion those first two embryos into children. Rosa and Lance. They had Mac’s dark hair and my face. The boy was creative, artistic, like his father, the girl fascinated by how the world works. I never shared those fantasies with Mac. I was ashamed to think that way, fooling myself with sentiment, when in reality neither of them had ever amounted to more than a cluster of cells that survived less than seventy-two hours in a laboratory.
Chapter Thirteen
Bel was very bound up in a new relationship with a guest director. It had lasted beyond his stint in Yorkshire and she spent whatever time she could with him in London, where he was working in television. I assumed that was why I’d heard so little from her over the summer.
When I rang to tell her our bad news, Colin answered. She was away for a few days in Amsterdam with Philip.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘It didn’t work, Colin. Will you tell her?’
‘Oh, no. Lydia, I am sorry.’
‘I know.’ We were all sorry. The whole world was sorry. What else could people say?
‘She’ll be back tomorrow,’ he said. ‘She’ll give you a call.’
But she didn’t. Perhaps she didn’t know how to respond or maybe the whole thing bored her. As someone who didn’t want children herself, my craving, the agonies I was going through, my obsession and neediness, must have been hard to empathise with. But she was one person I really wanted to share it with. I missed her so much.
Two months later, we met by accident. Bel was on her way to work and I’d gone into town to get a new watch battery fitted and buy a bra.
I saw her ahead of me on the Headrow. I recognised her gait, the shock of black and crimson hair, the leather jacket she wore. Calling, I hurried to catch up. She turned and saw me, and this look crossed her face. Dislike or disquiet? Only a flash before she smiled but my old insecurities were rekindled. Those feelings and memories of rejection, thinking she didn’t want to come and stay with me in the summer holidays, and the time in Berlin.
‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Been a while.’
‘Yes.’
‘I was sorry to hear about . . . you know.’ She kept looking over my shoulder, not at me.
‘Right. You in a rush?’ I was thrown by the strained atmosphere.
‘Sort of. I’ll give you a ring?’
She turned to go but I saw her eyes fall to her stomach, her arm curving protectively across it, and I glimpsed the swelling there. Bel who had always had a flat belly, the envy of the rest of us. Bel with her recklessness, her casual encounters, her abortions.
I clutched her upper arm and she swung back to face me. ‘You’re pregnant,’ I said.
She opened her mouth to deny it, then tossed her head, the rings in her ear glinting in the light, and glanced away from me. Her lips tightening, she said, ‘Yeah.’
I couldn’t speak. There was a clamour of noise in my mind, an impulse to shout at her, to grab her and shake her. In that moment I hated her. Trembling, I stepped back and moved away, my errands forgotten, my heart thundering in my chest and an awful aching in my throat.
The one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world and she had stolen it from me.
Mac groaned in dismay when I told him. ‘Lousy timing,’ he said.
‘I can’t see her,’ I said. ‘I can’t. Not when—’ I couldn’t go on. My eyes burned and there was a lump like a hot coal behind my breastbone. She’s done it on purpose. It was a childish thought but I couldn’t be rational. I’d lost all sense of proportion and perspective. Jealousy surged through me like a fever when I thought about Bel having a baby, of her and her man playing happy families.
‘Ah, darlin’, you do what’s best for you,’ Mac said.
Bel didn’t make any attempt to get in touch with me and I put my energy into focusing on the IVF.
At my request, we didn’t tell our families we were starting the final round. I hadn’t the emotional energy to deal with anyone else. I wanted to keep it private, secret. My world was narrowing. I was withdrawing. It was the only way I could cope.
It was hard at work where one colleague was coming back from maternity leave and another’s wife had just found out she was expecting. Sometimes, as the talk of sleepless nights, feeding problems and childminders ebbed and flowed, and I prayed for them to shut up, I wondered if it would be easier if I just announced my situation.
The weather was atrocious the week they retrieved my eggs. A rainstorm swept across the city coming off the Pennines, bringing floods. We got soaked walking from the car to the building, the rain drumming down and rivulets of water underfoot, swirling with the first leaves of autumn.
Mac kissed me goodbye and I was wheeled into pre-op. My hands and feet were cold, the cellular blanket and hospital gown inadequately warm. I felt sick, and hungry from fasting since the night before.
Most of all I was scared. How would I cope if we failed? How could I bear it?
Then they came with the sedative and the mask and I began the countdown.
Waking, my head hurt, a pain vice-like around my temples and in my jaw. Along with the familiar raw throat from the anaesthetic.
I didn’t ask immediately. I wanted to imagine great news, a high number of eggs, all fat and ripe, mature enough to permit fertilisation.
I shifted on the trolley. The nurse came over.
‘How many?’ I said.
‘Nine.’
‘Nine!’ Nine was good. Nine was better than ever. Tears pressed behind my eyes. ‘Thank you.’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Groggy, headache, but OK.’ None of that mattered. It would be all right. I’d have my baby.
That evening Mac and I were giddy with tension. He made a pan of chilli con carne and we watched Dalziel and Pascoe on TV.
All the next day as I went about my work I checked the clock. Nine eggs. Nine was great. Even if only half made it.
They rang at three in the afternoon. ‘We have one fertilised egg.’
‘One.’ A slap in the face.
‘It’s looking healthy and dividing as we would hope. We would like to transfer on Tuesday, all being well.’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘If you can come in for eleven?’
‘Yes. Yes, I will.’
I put the phone down feeling numb. One embryo. Everything resting on a single try. What chance was there?
Then the counter-arguments began in my head. We had a viable embryo. It was behaving as it should. We were giving it extra time to grow stronger. It might happen this time. This was good.
